Geographer recreating Atlanticís early hurricane history

By Peggy Binette, peggy@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-5400

While meteorologists are busy forecasting and tracking this year’s crop of hurricanes using the latest satellite technology, University of South Carolina geographer Dr. Cary Mock is combing through 300-year-old British ship logs for weather data to detail hurricanes of the past.

Mock, an associate professor of geography in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, is the only academic researcher conducting historical maritime climate research. He has amassed approximately $700,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to research and reconstruct the hurricane and severe weather history of the Atlantic Coast.

“Maritime climate work is a new movement in the field,” Mock said. “There’s a great deal of detail to early ship’s logs. They provide a lot of data on extreme weather events. We know every South Carolina hurricane back to 1722 because of the British ship logs.”

Working from plantation records, diaries, newspapers and other early 18th- and 19th-century written accounts, Mock has spent the last decade building a comprehensive historical database of hurricane activity that extends back hundreds of years before modern weather instrumentation.

In 2007, he turned his attention more fully to ship logs, both U.S. and British, knowing that the maritime records would provide greater detail. This summer, he spent several weeks in England, his sixth trip to research log books from the British Royal Navy, East India Company and whaling logs. He’ll return to England in late fall.

Mock says he has reviewed nearly 3,000 ship logs from England and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and various New England maritime archives, dating from the early 1700s to the 1870s. Of those, he said 300 – 400 have provided useful information. Few whaling logs -- about 28 -- provided any hurricane information.